


Won't let you be denied

by humansandotherpeople



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Developing Relationship, Hurt/Different Hurt to Assuage First Hurt/Smidgen of Comfort, Information/Trauma Vampirism, M/M, Missing Scene, Mutual Self-Sacrifice, Starvation/Withdrawal, set between MAG 159 and MAG 160
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-09
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-25 21:07:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21362698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/humansandotherpeople/pseuds/humansandotherpeople
Summary: Three weeks are a long time. Cut off from his source of statements, the Magnus Institute, Jon isn't doing too great.Martin worries a bunch and desperately wants to help.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 6
Kudos: 219





	Won't let you be denied

Jon stares after another man. Some old codger from the village that Martin has greeted cheerily just a moment ago, and a few times before that, but never really took much notice of. Certainly not as much as Jon is taking at the moment. Now that Martin's attention is drawn to him, he finds that the elderly man looks harrowed somehow.

Jon holds his hand more tightly. But he doesn't look away. Martin leans close to him, whispers in his ear: “Are you... hungry?”  
“I'm fine,” Jon says. But he still doesn't look away.

Martin tugs him along, as he is sure he was implored to by the tighter grip on his hand. Jon looks back over his shoulder. The old man has noticed now – he looks worried. And he is very right to. Martin gives him an apologetic smile and places himself firmly in the line of sight between Jon and his prospective victim until he has him around the next corner.

“You're not fine,” he hisses at Jon. “When have you had your last statement?”

“In the Lonely. Peter's,” Jon admits, flatly.

“You've got to be kidding me,” says Martin, burying his face in his hands. “We broke into your old flat to get you the paper ones you used to keep under your bed and everything! Do you at least still have those?”

“It's only three,” Jon defends himself, “And Peter has been... sustaining me for a while. I thought I could keep them until it gets worse. Since we're not getting new ones.”

“It's worse now!” Martin insists. “Basira's said she's sending a care package up. You're having a statement as soon as we get home. Promise?”

“Promise.”

  
  


Basira has trouble getting back into the archives and even more getting anything out of them. She is not trusted. Too embroiled in it all. The three statements are gone far too fast, on Martin's insistence. There's Marjory Hennick, who could not enter churches and in the end not even walk past pictures with saints in them without them catching fire. There's Jegor Rosinov, in whose fifth-floor flat a two-hundred foot well opened up that did not pass through the flats of any of his downstairs neighbours. Then there's Billie and Benny O'Donnelly, twins who could read each other's minds – until one day they couldn't.

Jon reads them over and over, murmuring to himself and giving the tape recorder looks as if he's begging it to click on. It never does. The information is no longer relevant, if it ever was, and it's clear that he's getting nothing from it.

He does not blink anymore. His pupils are constantly blown wide open. Bright lights startle him, but he does not look away from them. So do sudden noises, even quieter ones. Martin assumes his ears are the equivalent of wide open, too. His whole body tries to suck in information in any way it can. He sleeps with his eyes open, when he sleeps, which isn’t often.

Martin thinks of Trevor's description of vampires a lot. They do not speak, but you know what they want anyway. Jon talks plenty, just not about what he wants. What he so clearly, clearly needs. They trade anecdotes, they make observations, they make jokes that become running gags in record time. Jon even regales him with an underhanded compliment now and again. Anything they haven't talked about for so many reasons in the past months, in the past years. It would be heaven, if Jon didn't rub his burning eyes constantly, without closing them. If he didn't flinch at any unexpected sound. If he could keep human food down. If he didn't look more emaciated by the day.

Jon no longer accompanies him when he goes down to the village. Instead, he implores him to take the one key they have and lock the door behind himself whenever he goes out.

  
  


One day, Jon silently hands Martin the key, closes his fingers around it.

“I'm not going out,” Martin says, surprised. “Unless there's anything you need.” Martin wants to slap himself as soon as he's said it. Of course and obviously there's something Jon, trembling, stick-thin, unsteady-voiced Jon needs. “Anything I could get you.” Without kidnapping the most traumatised looking person he can find in the village.

“No...” Jon shakes his head slowly. “I locked the door already. Please hide it?”

Martin has to laugh. “Hide it? From _you?!_”

“I can at least try to keep the knowledge out if I don't have it in the first place.” Jon sounds sharp and a little offended, but his voice softens immediately. “It'll buy you time when you have to stop me.”

Jon leaves Martin with that, and with his hand still in a fist around the key, closing the bedroom door behind himself softly.

“Damn it,” Martin mutters to himself. He is overwhelmed by sudden compassion for Basira, of all people. He's not going through nearly as much as she is, at least not in this regard. It's not a gun, it's only a key. And yet...

Martin sighs and shoves the key down the front of his pants. It's eminently uncomfortable, but not nearly as uncomfortable as Jon would be trying to retrieve it, he thinks grimly.

  
  


Basira's phone calls get shorter and more discouraging. Jon is looking worse and worse and Martin is despairing. He has to do something. Anything. There's a dilapidated copy-shop on the far side of the village – if he could take the last statements down there, cover the handwriting, make blank forms, maybe they'll be enough, maybe they'll do. He can go around and say he's doing some sort of survey. Not like the people around here don't think he's weird already for being English alone.

When he retrieves Marjory Hennick's statement for this purpose from underneath Jon's pillow by some great act of cuddling subterfuge, he finds actual bites missing out of it. Jon has been chewing on the thing. Does the form retain whatever magical power it has when it has tooth marks in it? Will surly Scotsmen take it seriously enough to fill out that way? And anyway: Will all statements he gathers in this fashion be as useless as what they collected back when Jon was in America, then China, without the power of the Archivist shaping them into their coherent form? Wouldn't it be easier and have a better chance of success if he just left the key out?

Martin isn't that passionate about protecting the villagers, who switch from sometimes decipherable Scots English to absolutely alien Scots Gaelic when they approach (or just he approaches, as has been the case more recently). He's not sure whether it's suspicion of the English, which he's sympathetic to, or racism or homophobia, which he's not. Or it could just be aversion to their obvious weirdness, which would at least be understandable, he guesses. Either way, he doesn't care about them. Not really. Not the way he cares about Jon.

How many would he need to take, anyway? Not more than one or two, surely, before Basira finally comes through. And it's not like he's going to kill them. There are worse things than nightmares. Martin's lived perfectly well with quite astonishingly hideous nightmares for years now.

He doesn't really have it in him though, does he? But what else can he do?

Jon interrupts his miserable thoughts with an even more miserable declaration. “I think you should probably leave,” he croaks.

“What?!” is all Martin can say to that. Is this because he snatched the statement? But surely that's not enough to... He had believed – He had honestly thought Jon... wanted him around–

Before Martin can further question their connection and his self-worth, Jon continues: “Just until Basira gets into the archives. And then however long the post takes. For safety. I'd go myself, since it's obviously not your fault. But containing me here is just more practical. I'm sorry.”

Jon is looking at him. Has been looking at him. And only now does Martin recognize the way he's _looking_ at him. Part of him, a very deep and instinct-driven part, actually very much wants to run away from that look.

“Jon,” he says, mouth dry, “is there something... you want to know? From me? Of course I'll give you– of course I'll tell you– please, you can ask me–”

“Of course you'd sacrifice yourself for me,” Jon scoffs, as though he isn't proposing isolating and possibly starving himself just to protect Martin from some minor invasion of privacy and a few additional nightmares. “Don't. I imagine it just wants your story of being drawn into the Lonely, or into the Archive itself, or the worms or– any of that, and I _know_ all that already, and Martin, I don't want to make you relive that. And, and you don't have to feel like you have to – not when it wouldn't help more than taking a bite out of Marjory Hennick's statement. You can see that, right?”

“I can't really, no,” Martin answers honestly. “I'd at least want to try. Even if you really already knew it all, I mean, I don't– for one, I don't think having you lurking in my dreams would be all that bad, you know. But it's a moot point anyway. I've... I think I've got a real secret. That you could... take.”

Jon actually has the temerity to laugh. “Did you lie about anything else on your CV?”

“No, you do already know all of that.” And God had he been terrified of that getting out. Not nearly as terrified as he is now, though. “It's... something else. There's... supernatural stuff in it, and it's... actually horrifying, when you think about it. And I'm proper, proper scared of telling you. Which has to count for something.”

Jon looks even sicker than he has the last few days, which is an achievement. But underneath that, he also looks... tempted. “Then I really. Really shouldn't...”

“No, you absolutely should,” Martin says, finding certainty somewhere in the expanse of dread that his mind has become. “I'm not going to leave you to die, Jon.” Finger shaking almost as badly as Jon, he points to the ever-present tape recorder on the table, which has, unnoticed up to now, turned itself on sometime during their conversation. “Look, it agrees it's going to be worth your while.”

Jon stares at him, silently, fingers digging deep into his own upper arms as he tries to hold on to himself, swaying ever so gently back and forth. Then, finally, he breaks. “Fine,” he says, and then keeps just staring, as if Martin could ever be brave enough to tell him something like that without a compulsion, however much he wants to.

“Take my statement,” he squeaks.

A shudder runs through Jon, clearly distinguishable from his ongoing trembling. “Fine,” he says again, then takes a deep breath. For the next part his voice is much more composed than before.

“Statement of Martin Blackwood, regarding... Do I just say 'A Secret', or...?”

“Regarding being in love with the Archivist,” whispers Martin.

A single chuckle from Jon. “That's _not_ a secret.”

Martin rolls his eyes. “If that was all there was to it, I wouldn't have to give a whole statement about it.”

“Oh well,” Jon says, still smiling as his words gain undertones of crackling static, “regarding that, then. Taken live from subject on the fifteenth of October, 2018. Martin. Tell me your secret.”

A moment ago, saying what he had to had seemed one of the most difficult things in the world. Now it's easy. So easy.

“The thing is that back in the day, when you had just become Head Archivist, before... even before Jane Prentiss, I had something of a crush on you. And you were cold and abrasive and in a position of authority and not very impressed with me. In a word, unreachable. And that was honestly part of the attraction. I was under no illusion that anything would ever come of it, so I wouldn't get my heart broken. Except I did a bit, all the times you wouldn't take care of yourself. I guess some things haven't changed that much.”

A hint of another smile from Jon. Is it just Martin's wishful thinking, or is he already shaking less? He hasn't even got to the bad bit yet.

“But others have. Clearly.” Martin gestures to Jon, vaguely in the direction of his eyes. This is where he just wouldn't be able to go on, without the compulsion. With it, he can just say it. In fact, he can't _not_ say it. It feels as relieving as it feels horrifying. Martin can picture, briefly, a future in which he is just as dependent on this as Jon is on the other side of it. “And that's the secret. It was only ever a crush, on Jonathan Sims, the human. It's... very much not just that, now. I love you, Jon. You, the Archivist.

“I don't _miss_ him. He was just my scary boss who I happened to have a crush on. I wouldn't want him back, not when I can have you. God, I was so much more _afraid_ of him than I am of you. When you offered to leave the Archives? With me? Yes, I said no because I didn't believe you really wanted to, and because you might very well die of it, but you also might just... go back.

“And I know it's selfish of me, that you didn't really want to become this, at least as much as you didn't really want to blind yourself. I know I shouldn't prefer you when you have to suffer like you have this week, just because you're, you're _nicer_ to me now.” And you love me back now, Martin isn't going to say, because Jon hasn't actually told him that, not in those words. But it's so obvious, and the compulsion evidently doesn't care about details like that, and there the words are, already out of his mouth and in the room and on the possibly vaguely supernatural magnetic tape and in Jon's hungry ears: “And you love me back now.”

Jon blinks for the first time in a week. Martin could cry with relief and with shame.

Then Jon says: “Enough, enough, thank you, statement ends.” When the tape recorder doesn't follow the implicit command, he actually pushes the button with a finger, then eyes the device suspiciously. It stays off, at least for the moment.

Jon leans back, unprecedentedly pressing his eyelids shut, with a pained expression. Other than that, he looks much healthier. That's good, that's good, because it was only a short statement, because Jon is right, he knows so much about Martin already. And yet it _worked_. But a teardrop spills out from the corner of Jon's closed eye, glistening on his cheek, and Martin regrets deeply, heart-wrenchingly, that he didn't have any horrifying secrets to give that wouldn't have hurt Jon.

“Should I... Should I leave now?” Martin asks.

“No, no, it got what it... I got what I needed. Oh Martin, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry I was so bad at being a person, when I still was one.”

“You're still a person, Jon,” Martin protests, and he leans over and wipes the tear away. And the one after it, and the one after that. Jon ends up crying into Martin's shirt, rattled with sobs that are muffled by Martin's shoulder, while Martin awkwardly pats his bony back.

“At any rate,” Jon eventually says, still hoarse from crying, “I don't think you have to worry about me going back to not loving you.”

**Author's Note:**

> Is Being the Archivist ego-systonic or ego-dystonic? We may never know!  
Do I have a Thing about Martin giving Jon live statements? Perhaps we will gain more insight into this mystery as I write more fics


End file.
